Our Christmas "Once Upon a Time . . ."

I’ve gotta admit I’m torn. It’s Christmas weekend, but I’d promised to continue the Apostolic writing conversation a few weeks back. Maybe I can interlace the strands.

In the December 2007 issue of the Atlantic, there’s a feature on The Golden Compass, where author and atheist Phillip Pullman is quoted: “‘Thou shalt not’ might reach the head, but it takes ‘Once upon a time’ to reach the heart.” I think he’s correct. (It’s why most Christians can’t delineate doctrine, but will happily tell detailed Bible stories.)

The quote reiterates that storytelling is an especially valuable (if overlooked) talent in the kingdom, yet most (all?) Western religions have been remiss in taking up its standard (and most of the other arts) in the past 100+ years.

The best gift we can offer Christ on his birthday celebration is the creativity he gave us and the willingness to work hard alone to develop it so that others will be touched, even changed by our efforts to please Him. (That gift makes most others look cheap.)

Apostolic Talents, Ordinary Writing
We’ve been circling the cagey, elusive beast called Apostolic Writing almost since the beginning of this blog (July 2007). Lee Ann’s recent post triggered the most comments by comparing us to a story about Mormon missionaries she’d read, and musing on Apostolic writing in that regard. Marjorie followed up with some astute comparisons to the two testaments, which also created a response. Naturally, there have been some misunderstandings.

I don’t think anyone is insisting Apostolics should write only to Christians or publish only with a Christian publisher. It’s a wide-open world and mainstream publishing is happy to print quality Christian fiction.

Our “Apostolic writing” thoughts have fallen under four headings:

1. Apostolic Worldview
Presumably this would be anything written by an Apostolic, though let’s be honest – many of us are better Americans than we are Apostolics. Not to sound cynical, but if nothing differentiates your writing from anyone else’s, then it’s just writing, not Apostolic writing, it’s “clean,” it’s not biblical.

Any worldview is most obvious when choices are dramatized with characters choosing differently. An Apostolic worldview should insist on showing the reality of biblical choices in tough situations with realistic results (i.e. honesty is rarely the best policy if you’re seeking instant rewards).

2. Apostolic Setting
Completely untapped today, but there are a long list of settings worth exploring or using as background color for any type of story – horror, crime, comedy, or family drama.

3. Apostolic Characters
Whenever Graham Greene wrote literature or “entertainments” (as he termed it), he nearly always included a Catholic character in the mix. So whether it was crime novels, spy satires, adventures, or literature probing the deeper points of unbelief, there’s always the realization that believers exist in society today. (Yes, it’s obvious to us, but think about how many books/ movies/ stories we absorb today without a single acknowledgement to that fact.)

4. Apostolic Literature
Whenever I use this term, I’m referring to the possibility of creating a group of titles (hopefully worthy of the canon) that are distinctly Apostolic while universally human. Something readers will pick up because its unique worldview (seen nowhere else in literature) reveals fascinating characters (seen nowhere else in literature) interacting in surprising settings (seen nowhere else in literature) that say so much more about everyone’s humanity. No, you don’t have to include them all for something to be authentically Apostolic, but you could.

Happy Birthday Jesus!
Writing is difficult, but satisfying. It’s summoning the courage to step out and say (via publishing), “Look! This is my soul! Interact with it and you’re likely to be unhappy and think less of me! But I’m using my talents for the king of kings and lord of lords! Wheeee!”

He couldn’t possibly ask for more than, "Once upon a time, there was a writer who wanted to give a King a gift . . ."

It’s Gotta Be The Atheists!

We can’t whine that the mainstream publishing industry is unreceptive, even hostile, to literature that has Christian characters, themes, and/or metaphors. There’s just too much evidence to the contrary. (And no, I’m not talking about Christian book publishers that, with few exceptions, are by Christians to Christians, and that only Christians know exist.)

Major awards and publicity have been given to overtly Christian literature in the last decade. To name just a few:

• Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, a book about an aging Calvinist minister writing to his young son (how’s that for an exciting concept?), won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005.
• Kent Haruf’s Plainsong was fiction finalist for the National Book Award in 1999.
• Leif Enger’s Peace Like a River (2001) was a Book of the Month choice and featured in an NPR book club discussion.
• Brett Lott’s Jewel (1991) was an Oprah choice in 1999.
• Still one of the most prestigious forums for short fiction, The Atlantic Monthly’s annual Fiction Issue (on newsstands now) features three (of six) short stories that involve religious faith. Last year, there was one—Tim Gautreaux’s “The Safe.”

True, it’s not an overabundance of riches, though once you start including highly-regarded authors who include Christians or characters struggling with God in their works, the list noticeably inflates.

Shooting The Canon

This doesn’t include the Western Canon, where two of the all-time best were Christians:

• Many consider Dante’s Divine Comedy to be a greater poetic accomplishment than anything Shakespeare created.
• Leo Tolstoy created two fascinating prose classics—War and Peace, Anna Karenina—that are too often known for their length instead of their brilliance. He was also a master of short stories (“Master and Man”) and novellas (The Death of Ivan Illych).

Then there’s these Christian slackers:

• Flannery O’Conner’s short stories (“Parker’s Back,” “Revelation,” “A Good Man is Hard to Find”) were powerful enough to power her into the canon.
• Graham Greene (The End of the Affair, The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter) is said to have been short-listed for the Nobel Prize for literature.
• C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia are undisputed children’s favorites.
• Fyodor Dostoyevsky is still proclaimed the most psychologically astute novelist who has ever written, penning Crime and Punishment, Notes from the Underground, and The Brothers Karamazov.

Defining their Christianity is not my intent. Showcasing their unflinching portrayal of Christianity, its themes and characters, is.
The Truth We Ignore?
Publishing isn’t nearly as biased against Christian works as it is against inferior works, (though it sometimes seems too eager to publish the inferior). Perhaps the problem isn’t hostile atheists, but Apostolics unwilling to bleed on the page for their calling. Perhaps we’d rather kind of give it a go from the safety of our churches rather than dive into the requirements publishing today demands.

Like Christian musical artists unwilling to move to Nashville to risk their lucky break, we may find ourselves not attending writing conferences (where agents and publishers examine manuscripts), or taking writing courses with experienced professionals (that costs money!), or going the extra mile for our calling, then wonder why we can’t get connected to major publishers. Everything takes work.

Most of the titles mentioned are the current and classic standards of literary excellence. If we’re to continue this tradition we must read them, study them, love them, and then seek to build upon them..

I think we can do it. I know we will do it. Wanna be first?

Pioneers, Not Prairie Romances

It’s one thing to ridicule prairie romances and the people who read them. It’s quite another to offer a viable alternative for people who hunger to read something more ambitious.

Last week, several readers speculated that Pentecost suffered from a lack of important writings due to a non-existent academic culture, insecurity, and a tendency to romanticize the past. I would also add the lack of a paying infrastructure for writers, a church-specific culture that encourages (often healthily) high involvement, and the lack of Apostolic examples to emulate.

All of these factors distract from the solitary task of writing serious works of high ambition. Most of these factors distract from the solitary task of writing simple-minded romances, 365 day devotionals, and religious self-help books. Except, the later are appearing by the dozens.

See, I hate writing this, but at the end of the day, they’re all excuses. Ultimately, we’re either going to pursue the calling God placed in our hearts, or we’re not. We’re either going to sacrifice our lesser interests for a significant dream or we’re going to keep filling our schedules with more unmemorable events. We’re either going to face the fear straight-up or allow self-justification to confound our heart. As Jedi Master Yoda said, “Do or not do. There is no try.”

O Pioneers!
One reason I started ninetyandnine.com (with a like-minded bunch of hearty adventurers) was my utter frustration with the quality of articles in our official publications. By quality, I’m not just dismissing the writing, but the article topics—so very few seemed to be engaging the world around them. The only way I could change that was to co-create a different type of Apostolic magazine. It’s pretty well consumed my life for seven years now, but we all have something to show for it. God blessed our dive off the cliff.

Writing something important will take a similar fearlessness. Right now, in our little sub-culture of Christianity, it calls for pioneers, the determined loners who are willing to grind out the trails for others, the bull-headed who are willing to make mistakes (sometimes in public), lose days (weeks?) of their lives exploring dead-end ravines, and face unforeseen difficulties just to reach their destination (which may not be all it’s promised to be).

It takes a different mindset.

Interestingly, it’s the mindset of an apostle that’s needed. Interestingly, one definition of “apostle” is “pioneer.” Think about it—we call the Apostle Paul the greatest missionary ever because of all the churches he pioneered.

The mission of an apostle is “to proclaim God's revelation, to teach the new truth the church would need to grow and thrive.” That’s the mission of pioneer Apostolic literary authors. After all, our most ambitious writings must proclaim God’s revelation through characterization, metaphor, and exposition.

That the apostle's calling is the most peculiar of the five-fold ministries isn’t the issue. It’s the most necessary for the growth (in every sense) of the Church. It’s when the apostles are unleashed that the transformations occur. It's in the unexplored lands that God rewrites man's rules with revival. It's what pioneers crave.

We don’t need more Apostolic writers. We need more writing apostles.

Ready to dive off the cliff with me?

What is Pentecostal Writing?

As 90&9.com’s executive editor for content, I read endless articles from an Apostolic perspective. I also write more than my fair share. It was at the completion of a recent cover that I thought, “This is an important article.” That’s an intoxicating thought. It empties your head and lightens your heart and fills both with peculiar dreams of immortality and respect.

It didn’t take me long for me to realize it was the topic, not the essay, that was important. I had served only as the messenger. Oh well, it was an intoxicating thought.

It did make me wonder if there were any important Apostolic writings.

For a piece of writing to be “Important” it’s not enough to be powerful and true. It must also be ground-breaking and insightful and forward-looking and forceful enough to make readers rethink themselves; often it reframes an argument for a generation, providing the template for future interpretation.

I had a knowledgeable Pentecostal argue to me that there were no important Apostolic writings to date. He felt our oral tradition interfered with this process, but added that even our valuable doctrinal writings are defensive in nature, so couldn’t be considered Important. I found that fascinating.

Cases in Point

Three non-Apostolic examples of Important:

* T.S. Eliot recast poetry with The Wasteland.

* George Keenan’s writings provided the intellectual framework for the United States’ policy of containment towards the U.S.S.R. during the Cold War.

* In 1993, Samuel P. Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations posited that the world’s upcoming, post-Soviet conflicts would be over religious and cultural identities, not politics. It wasn’t an outright prediction of 9/11, but…

Speaking in New Tongues

Maybe it is finding someone brave enough to recreate the language to accommodate our experience.

The father of modern African literature, Chinua Achebe, crafted a new language for his seminal Things Fall Apart: “The story is so different from what I had read as a child; I knew I couldn’t write like Dickens or Conrad. My story would not accept that. So you had to make an English that was new. Whether it was going to work or not, I couldn't tell.”

Maybe we're at a similar starting point, awaiting direction.

What is Pentecostal Identity?

Maybe there’s no Important Apostolic writing because we don’t have a well-defined identity.

Many writing subcultures present distinct commonalities; for instance, Southern writing often features quirky characters, homespun sayings, racial tensions, and sweltering settings.

Maybe our subculture isn’t potent enough to lend itself to a particular style of writing because we are chiefly Americans (largely indistinguishable from mass culture) with potent doctrinal truths. Is doctrine, its resulting standards, and large social events all that makes us “us”? (Am I overlooking some important distinctives?)

Many would see these three distinctives as an overabundance of fodder for some smart fiction (Jane Austen anyone?) or strong cultural analysis. Somehow the Catholics have spawned superior authors (Flannery O’Conner, Graham Greene, Walker Percy) and cultural analysts (starting with their two most recent popes), so it’s not like an Apostolic outlook is a preposterous proposition.

Maybe we are believers built around doctrinal ideas, with room for numerous amorphous characteristics, but few clear definitives. If true, that’s okay. The United States is built around a set of ideas with few clear definitives and it’s doing just fine.

Still, we’ve been at this for over a century—shouldn’t we have something to show for it?